A floating city of peasants : the great migration in contemporary China / Floris-Jan van Luyn ; translated from the Dutch by Jeannette K. Ringold.

Prologue: wishful thinking -- A floating city of peasants: city builders -- Embroidered insoles: those who stay behind -- Tiny plots of land: poverty -- Garbage for a living: garbagemen -- A halfhearted welcome: rules -- Purchased innocence: offering their bodies -- The cost of rain: corruption -- Roses wrapped in plastic: flower peddlers -- Doctors and soldiers: education -- Trust to the threshold: caregivers -- The affair of the cut-off tongue: justice -- Always a peasant: substitute sowers -- Epilogue: fear and the peasant migration.

"In A Floating City of Peasants, Floris-Jan van Luyn - who spent six years living in and reporting from China - relates the remarkable tales of migrant workers who have helped fuel the explosive growth of the People's Republic. In a series of a dozen intimate portraits illuminated by wide-ranging reporting, we meet Wang Hong, a prostitute who has become a mami (a female pimp) in order to make enough money to send her son to agricultural college in Chengdu; Chunming, who stole money from his parents to pay for the long trip to Beijing and found work on a garbage dump; Lusong, who campaigned for a village school and against corrupt government employees and as a result was tortured almost to death; and others with equally gripping stories."--BOOK JACKET.